A Beautiful Life makes up for lost time


A Beautiful Life
Pupule rating 3.0 (out of 4)
Netflix

As usual, I'm a straggler to great new things. The iPhone. The iPod. Driving a car. Netflix. I just subscribed a week ago — the free first month didn't hurt — and now I wonder what took me so long. Kingdom rules. I'm glad I finally caught that series. And with that come several other Korean series and films. But instead, I took a shot at a Chinese movie, "A Beautiful Life."

It was a bore for a good 30 minutes. The script practically drew a female lead who is absolutely unlikeable. Can a police officer (the male lead) be this gullible and naive? For most of the first half of this (two-hour) flick, the most interesting characters are his brother (autistic?) and his love interest (a deaf girl who works nearby). What the whaa...

I almost clicked off. But the story got less predictable and generic along the way, and the final 45 minutes is actually fast. Almost too fast. There are some edit cuts that had me wondering if everyone in the post-production was on the same page. But the emotion and passion really don't surface until those last 45 minutes. I didn't care for the ending, not because I wasn't rooting for this couple, but because it was almost unbelievable.

As my old pal @fatlark would say, this ending would never happen in a Korean movie. And he is correct.










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